


Palmistry

by jenna_thorn



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-13
Updated: 2010-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-11 19:11:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/115948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenna_thorn/pseuds/jenna_thorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'd lost my compass, my only tie to my father, but I'd found a pole star.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Palmistry

**Author's Note:**

> Written after the first movie, and therefore not canon-compliant.

_"Your boy is on high again, love."_

I had scoffed at the idea of palm readers, once. Dismissed them as a child's fancy when I took up the hammer and anvil, not by any choice of my own, not by fate or destiny, but by happenstance. I'd set out from England an orphan, yes, but one with funds, my mother's careful savings. I'd arrived in wet shoes and penniless, a foundling in rags, having left behind the King's blanket on the ship. I needed a roof; the smith needed an apprentice. So I found myself in a smithy. I'd lost my compass, my only tie to my father, but I'd found a pole star.

 _"And now he's laughing at himself. 'Tis your task to jolly him out of what fickle mood he's found himself."_

I'd thrown rocks at home, skipping them over the miller's pond, bringing down rabbits and birds, worn calluses along the ridge of my fingers. Those changed, grew as I did, blackened and toughened and edged themselves as I edged steel; each inlay of gold in hilts left matching inlays of soot, of heat that didn't burn, but smoldered to temper my skin. And now my hands, my wrists, no longer hold heat, no longer shield me from the forge's searing sparks but have been flayed by rough bound rope, blackened not by soot, but by pitch with as punishing a odor as coke.

 _"Oh! What is his fascination with the rigging?"_

 _"Too long on land, I'd wager."_

 _"We've not been ashore in four days"_

 _"He's still making up for lost time, then, isn't he?"_

Have I known, all along, that I sail with the wind? My circumstances shift but I have always had a fixe'd light, a compass star, golden in the distance, not so distant now. Not so golden now, I must admit, with hair bound back in a club at her neck, that lesson learned at cost of a little blood and more dignity. She stands by our other, both watching me as I watch them.

 _"Ah, so at least he sees you. Dangerous thing to have on board, men who see things as aren't there."_

 _"Yes, yes, and women are unlucky on a ship. You don't believe that nonsense anymore than I do." She raises her voice to a carrying pitch. "Do be careful, Will."_

She speaks but I cannot hear her. I've finished the splice I came up here to do and test the rope by swinging out on it, wrapping one hand to control the speed of my fall, catching the tail of the rope in the crook of my knee to keep it from lashing up at me.

Elizabeth covers her eyes; Jack throws back his head and laughs.

I free myself from the swaying cling of the rope and kick out to land before them, indulging Jack in a grandiose bow.

We will part ways, eventually. Jack will never leave his Pearl and Elizabeth will grow weary of the salt air in her eyes and long to return to her father, to fresh milk and hot water. And Jack and the Pearl will go elsewhere for he will not leave her, not by choice, no more than I can leave my golden bride. She raises on her toes to kiss me and I smile.

These scars, too, I will bear, when I am an old man, and her father has won his case and I sit behind a desk, my hands stained not with black coal dust, not with salt and pitch, but with ink, black for accounts, brown for letters, blue for thoughts of the sea. I must let these sun bright days, these salt swept nights, build calluses in my mind so that in years to come as I carefully ignore genteelly worded slights, I may remember this, dropping to kiss her shoulder, feeling Jack's beard brush the back of my own neck, all of us tangled in the bedding strewn on the floor, having given up on any berth, rough linen bunched in Elizabeth's hands as she shakes sweat from her eyes and blows, a puff of air from red-kissed lips, Jack's beads away, as he shudders behind me. I would brand the sight of us together, the feel of sweat-slick skin, the scent of pine tar and hemp not only on my mind, but on my hand, so that I may rub the scar when the world has changed around me once again.

She will return to corsets and chemises of white lawn but below and beneath that will be this woman, curls at her temple escaping the rough leather binding, wearing a pirate's shirt covered in his scent of salt and stale rum, sleeves rolled bulky at her wrists, my own trousers knotted at her waist, the cuffs brushing the tops of her feet.

No palm reader, no crone in a back street market in cold England could see my life in my hands. I've cut this pattern on my own, laying the skin open to the bone on metal and stone, wood and rope. There is no guiding line here but the hand I hold as she pulls me, laughing, to the prow to watch the waves break against the beam.


End file.
